The problem of detecting and resolving plural targets located within a scan of a monopulse system draws interest from many radar and sonar applications such as target tracking, target recognition, surveillance, biomedical imaging, robotic vision, etc. When two targets or more are scanned by a monopulse antenna or transducer, the angles of arrival of the targets are merged into one angle by the antenna. This merged angle of arrival is far from angles of arrival of all targets within the beam, adds bias and wandering trends to measured targets' trajectories. The merged angle of arrival depends on a number of parameters such as the phase difference between targets' signals, the radar/sonar cross section ratio of the targets, and the angular separation between targets, which makes it difficult to extract any of these parameters directly from the merged data.
Most of existing techniques for detecting and resolving two closely spaced targets from standard monopulse data are limited in some fashion. One category of techniques developed for monopulse antennas with uniform radiation patterns and they require prior knowledge for some targets' parameters such as number of targets within the antenna scan, and radar cross section ratio of those targets. Another set of techniques rely on features of the signal that may not be available because they may occur outside the antenna scan under consideration or may be washed away due to either noise or quantization. A third set of techniques requires data not available in a standard monopulse system. The implementation of these techniques is generally not cost efficient and often requires additional hardware, raising the overall cost and complexity of the system.